Google Launches Server Tool To Speed Up The Web

The latest move in Google’s ongoing efforts to make the web faster is a new tool that optimizes web pages at the server level on-the-fly, with no manual work needed. It’s an Apache server module called mod_pagespeed and Google describes it as a follow-up to last year’s Page Speed browser add-on.

“There are 1.2 million users of Page Speed,” says Richard Rabbat, Google’s product manager for mod_pagespeed, “but it only tells developers what’s wrong with their web site. We wondered, ‘Can we fix it for them?'”

Google says the new Apache module has doubled the speed of a sampling of web sites used in its internal testing. It automatically performs more than 15 speed optimizations, including image caching, minimizing payload size, and more.

Google has two partners on board already: hosting/domain company GoDaddy and content delivery network provider Cotendo. And because the module is open-source, Google expects additional companies to adopt it, too.